The Sun's Unchanging Size Baffles Scientists

The sun's disk showing active region 10486, which became the largest sunspot seen by SOHO, the satellite Dr. Jeff Kuhn and collaborators used to monitor the sun's diameter.

Credit: SOHO/MDI consortium

The surface of the sun undergoes violent changes on a daily
basis, but a group of astronomers has found that the size of our nearest star
has been perplexingly constant in recent years.

The new study shows that the sun's diameter has changed by
less than one part in a million over the last 12 years. The sun's width today
is a steady 932,057 miles (1,500,000 km) across, the researchers found.

"The sun is remarkably constant," lead researcher
Jeff Kuhn, the associate director of the University of Hawaii Institute for
Astronomy, told SPACE.com. "We're measuring that the diameter changes by
less than a kilometer (0.62 miles).

"This constancy is baffling, given the violence of the
changes we see every day on the
sun's surface and the fluctuations that take place over an 11-year solar
cycle," Kuhn said.

The puzzling results also contradicted other measurements of
the sun taken from the ground, raising further questions on what could be
causing the discrepancies.

"What this really means is that, if we believe the
ground measurements, then what we're seeing is long-term fluctuations in the
Earth's atmosphere," Kuhn said. "The sun is influencing the
atmosphere of the Earth in very significant ways."

Kuhn's work is one of several worldwide efforts to
understand the influence of the sun on Earth's
climate.

"We can't predict the climate on Earth until we
understand these changes on the sun," Kuhn said.

Kuhn and his colleagues used NASA's Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory (SOHO) satellite to monitor the sun's diameter. They will soon
repeat the experiment with much greater accuracy using NASA's new Solar
Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which launched Feb. 11.

The SDO carries three instruments that constantly study the
sun in unprecedented high-definition detail and could help with future
examinations of solar size.

According to Kuhn, the ultimate solution to this puzzle will
depend on probing the smallest observable scales of the solar surface using the
Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which is scheduled to be completed
on Haleakala (on the Hawaiian island of Maui) in 2017.

"To be able to predict what the sun will do, we need
both the big picture and the details," Kuhn said. "Just as powerful
hurricanes on Earth start as a gentle breeze, the analogs of terrestrial storms
on the sun start as small kinks on the sun's magnetic field."